


The Stump Was Still Breathing (But the Tops Were Just Ashy Remains)

by lissaline



Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Gen, I can clearly only write very sad things, I'm sorry this is so depressing, Swearing, mentions of past rape/non-con, where people's negative self-talk is in italics..
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-15 01:10:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13020108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lissaline/pseuds/lissaline
Summary: Moira made it out of Gilead. She found Luke. She should be happy, she should be grateful. Right?





	The Stump Was Still Breathing (But the Tops Were Just Ashy Remains)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Topaz_Eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Topaz_Eyes/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide Topaz_Eyes! Thank you for the awesome assignment, I hope this is something like what you were looking for :) 
> 
> Title from I Know Girls by Mary Lambert

He doesn’t ask about her at first. They take the subway back to the place he’s been staying. It seems insane to Moira that they still have shit like subways, that the world hasn’t changed completely while she’s been away from it. The cold wind bites at her face when she opens the station door, and she closes her eyes.

“Is she…I mean, have you seen…” Luke’s quiet voice at her side makes her jump a little.

“She was alive, the last time I saw her.”

“When…” he clears his throat. “When was that?”

“A couple weeks ago.”

He nods, and they walk the rest of the way in silence. He must want to know more. Where she saw her, what she said, but he doesn’t ask. Moira is glad. She wants to keep pretending for a little while, too.

* * *

 

The apartment he’s been staying in is quaint and old looking, and it makes Moira ache for the place she and Odette lived when they first moved to the city. Then it makes her sick because she doesn’t think about her old life, that doesn’t exist anymore.

Luke introduces her to the girl he’s been staying with, Erin. She doesn’t talk. She just hovers, and stares, and looks sad. Moira wishes she wasn’t there. She wishes June was with her, so they could dislike the silent girl together. Or maybe June would laugh and tell her, stop being such a bitch. June was always the nicer one. Or maybe June would think the girl gave up. Would she call her a coward, too?

“You want something to eat, Moira?” Luke calls over his shoulder as he walks into the next room. “That food they give you at the refugee center is kind of shit.”

“Uh. Yeah. Sure.” Moira watches the silent girl turn back to whatever she’s looking at on her phone. God, she can’t even remember what it’s like to have a fucking phone.

Luke makes a chicken stir-fry, and Moira eats the whole thing in two minutes flat and then runs to the bathroom and throws it all up.

Luke stands outside the locked bathroom door and calls, “Moira? Moira, are you alright?”

When her stomach is scraped dry, Moira stands up and rinses her mouth, pointedly not looking at herself in the mirror. She opens the door and looks past Luke into the hallway.

“Are you alright?” He asks again. “Are you sick?”

“I’m fine,” Moira can feel her face burning. This is not her. She is not this weak. “They just… didn’t have a lot of chicken in Gilead. I’m not used to it, I guess.”

Luke opens his mouth to say something else, but Moira cuts him off.

“I just really need to sleep now, is that alright?”

“Of course. Of course. There’s a room just through here…”

* * *

 

Moira lays awake for hours that night. Not as if that’s unusual; she hasn’t had a full night sleep since before the red center. The bed is too soft, the room is too warm. At Jezebels all the girls slept in one big room on mattresses on the floor. She had resented the lack of privacy while she was there, but now she feels lonely without the sound of fifty girls breathing and whispering around her. She wishes she was back there.

Moira sits bolt upright in bed. What the fuck did she just think. _You do not wish you were back there. Get your fucking shit together._

When she finally falls asleep, she dreams about Odette. That hasn’t happened for a while. She used to dream about her every night, after she was taken in the Dyke Purge. In those dreams she would ask Moira why she hadn’t saved her. Why did she let them take her? And Moira would open her mouth to scream and cry and tell her how sorry she was, how she wished that she was taken too, how she wished she was dead so she didn’t have to miss her so much. But no sound would ever come out.

This dream is different. In this dream, Moira watches Odette from far away. She sees her across a gray, barren field. Maybe it used to be a soccer pitch, or a schoolyard. Now the ground is toxic sludge. Odette is bent over, pushing the silt towards a drainage pipe with a shovel. Moira watches her work, watches the way her hair falls into her face and her hands grip the handle of the shovel hard, so her knuckles turn white. After a moment, she stands up and wipes the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. Her eyes meet Moira’s across the field, and then slide quickly away. She doesn’t recognize her.

Suddenly Moira is running, getting closer and closer to Odette. She can see now the way her skin is sunburnt and her eyes look dull. She’s almost there now, almost close enough to touch her, _she’ll know me if I can just get close enough, if I can just touch her._

BANG.

Moira falls backwards, her head throbbing. Standing up again and thrusting her hands out in front of her, she finds her way blocked by a thick pane of glass. She bangs on the glass but Odette doesn’t look up. _She’s so close_.

“Odette! Odette!” She screams frantically, but the glass is too thick. She watches as the skin on Odette’s face begins to melt like candlewax, falling away, she shovels it all up, she has June’s face now, and June hears Moira screaming and looks up.

She opens her mouth and Moira sees her lips form a word.

_Coward._

* * *

 

The next morning at breakfast Moira eats plain toast slowly, not wanting a repeat of the night before. It wasn’t exactly that they starved them at Jezebels, but they weren’t overly concerned about the nutrition of whores who weren’t even going to pop out a baby. Gilead had better things to spend their resources on.

“Did you sleep okay, Moira?” Luke asks, spreading butter onto his own toast.

Moira nods, and Luke gives her a look like he doesn’t believe her.

“So have you found anyone else?” She asks swiftly, desperate to change the subject.

Luke shakes his head, setting down his knife.

“Not yet. We’ve been going to the refugee center every day, just in case someone comes in that we recognize.”

A sudden surge of vicious anger makes Moira clench her fists in her lap. She doesn’t even know who she’s angry at. The government, for not doing more to pull people out of that shithole? Luke, for somehow getting out of all of this unscathed? Herself? She pushes the anger down.

“So, Erin is going to a meeting this morning. Kind of a support group thing. For other survivors. You’re welcome to go, if you’re interested. No pressure, of course.”

Moira had actually forgotten the silent girl was even at the table with them. At the mention of her name she glances over to where Erin is sipping idly on her coffee. Moira doesn’t understand how Luke didn’t go insane, spending every day alone with this girl who never says anything.

Shaking her head, she processes what Luke had asked her. A support group. For _survivors_. Jesus christ.

“Um, no, that’s okay. Thanks, but…I’d like to walk around a bit today. I…” Moira cuts herself off before she can say what she’s thinking, that it’s been so long since she’s been allowed to walk around the outside world, not having to worry about Aunts or Eyes or fucking Commanders.

Luke nods a little nod as if he understands, which makes another wave of anger pass through Moira like nausea. _How could he understand_.

After breakfast, Moira borrows a coat from Luke and a hat and gloves from the silent girl, and makes her way out of the apartment building and onto the snowy street. She stands still for a moment, choosing which way to go, and marveling at the fact that she has a choice.

She turns left, and eventually finds herself at the main road. There are people here, walking or driving or sitting on benches. Moira is startled at the intense fear that shoots through her. She is rooted to the spot.

_Stop being ridiculous. What do you have to be scared of?_

An older woman passes by her carrying groceries, and Moira flinches violently. A man across the street meets her eyes and his face suddenly transforms into that of June’s commander, the one who had laughed and said, _Relax, I did something nice for you._

Moira turns and walks in the opposite direction. Eventually she comes to a deserted park. She brushes some snow from a bench and sits down, even though she is really fucking cold at this point and can’t feel her toes. The park has a jungle gym at its center, also deserted of course. Moira stares at it, wondering whether it’s just her perception that makes it look so depressing and ominous, or whether that’s just how things are now.

A million years ago, before the world fell apart, Moira used to think about having kids. Odette wanted them. She used to say, _Look at how perfect Hannah is, don’t you want that?_ And Moira would laugh and roll her eyes and say, _Yeah, but they’re not all like Hanna_. But in the back of her mind she always kept it as a possibility, something she thought they would probably get to someday.

She thinks now that she probably would have made a shit mom.

She’s almost back to Luke and Erin’s place, wishing she hadn’t sat on that freezing bench for quite so long, when something makes her look up. She’s in front of an old community center, its door propped open. It takes her a moment to realize what caught her attention. With a jolt in her stomach, she realizes it was music, a silly pop song she and June used to sing along to in college.

She finds herself inside the entrance of the community center without even noticing her feet had moved. It’s cold in here, obviously, why would they leave the fucking door open? She moves along the empty hall towards the music.

It’s coming from a big room at the end of the hall. The doors are wide open here too, but there are space heaters around the room and Moira can feel warmth where she stands just outside the door.

About twenty women mill around inside, standing or sitting in groups. Some of them dance along to the song. Some of them just talk to each other. It looks kind of like a PTA meeting, or a really bad middle school dance but with grown women.

Moira suddenly notices Erin sitting with a small group near the middle of the room. Was this the support group Luke had mentioned?

“Would you like to come in?” A quiet voice says beside her. Moira turns to see a woman about her age, giving her a tentative kind of smile.

Moira opens her mouth, not sure what she’s going to say, when she looks up again and sees Erin looking back at her.

“No. No, thank you.” Moira turns and hurries back out of the center before the woman can respond. When did she become the type of person who runs away?

* * *

 

That night Moira and Erin make dinner together, and Moira is grateful for the first time that Erin doesn’t talk. She doesn’t really feel like answering questions about why she had acted like such a freak when she saw her at the meeting. Erin does keep sending her these searching looks though, which is annoying.

The three of them eat in silence. Luke looks tired, Moira notices. She wonders what he does all day. Hannah looks so much like him.

Moira goes to bed right after dinner. She feels weird, empty, the way she felt before she would fuck some commander at Jezebels. Like she’s not real, or something. Like she could just float away.

She visits Odette again that night, she sits on the other side of the glass wall and watches her work. She stands up and bangs on the glass with her fists. Her knuckles split and she watches her blood trickle down her wrists. She screams Odette’s name.

Someone shakes her shoulder hard and she jolts awake. Erin is leaning over her, her eyes wide with what looks like fear. Moira sits up, breathing hard. Her face feels wet.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, her voice rough with sleep. “Was I yelling?”

Erin nods. She sits down on the edge of Moira’s bed, which Moira finds more than a little presumptuous.

“Sorry,” she says again, wondering what Erin wants from her. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

Erin just looks at her for a moment, and then rummages in the pocket of her sweatpants, pulling out a small pad of paper and a golf pencil. She scrawls something quickly and hands the pad to Moira.

_Don’t be sorry. I get nightmares too._

“Oh. Well. Okay.”

The corner of Erin’s lips twitch in what could be a smile. She reaches forward and puts her hand over Moira’s on top of the covers.

Her hand is warm, a little damp. Something about it makes Moira unbearably sad. Before she knows what she’s doing, she’s leaning forward and pressing her lips to Erin’s.

Almost immediately she pulls away. What the fuck is wrong with her? What the fuck did she just do? She feels sick. She is sick. She’s ruined, or broken, or something.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” she whispers it over and over again, her eyes shut tight. She jumps when she feels that hand again, this time gentle on her cheek. And then Erin’s arms are wrapped around her neck and Moira is resting her head against her shoulder, crying harder than she can ever remember crying. The sobs are loud and painful, wracking against her insides.

* * *

 

Moira wakes up the next morning feeling better rested than she has in a while. Her eyes feel sore and puffy, her throat raw. She looks over to see that Erin stayed. She sleeps curled up on her side, one arm extended so she can hold Moira’s hand.

Moira gets out of bed as quietly as she can and goes into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. She knows she should feel ashamed about last night, and she probably will later. But right now, she feels…better. Not good exactly, but a little less empty.

The sound of the front door suddenly bursting open makes Moira jump and spill coffee grounds all over the counter. Before she can move, Luke is in the doorway to the kitchen, his hat and shoulders covered in snow.

“Moira,” he says, a kind of wild look in his eyes. “You’ve got to come and see this.”

“What’s wrong?” she asks, already feeling anxiety building in her stomach.

“Nothing! Nothing’s wrong, I’ve just been at the refugee center…”

Erin wanders into the kitchen at that point, probably woken by all the noise. She looks curiously at Luke.

“I don’t know how to explain, guys. You just have to come and see.”

* * *

 

It’s letters. About a hundred letters, written on scrap paper, the backs of grocery store receipts, used napkins. They’ve pinned them up on a bulletin board in the refugee center, and people crowd around and crane their necks to read them.

Moira edges her way through the crowd. She can hear Luke talking behind her, saying things, asking questions about how they could have gotten there, who could have gotten them past the border, but his voice sounds far away to Moira.

She reaches up a hand and traces her fingers along one of the letters, written on an old piece of cardboard. She knows it’s probably just wishful thinking, that the package she sent June could have contained anything, but something about this just seems so…June. Almost like she’s reached out and handed Moira this gift, this glimmer of hope. She looks around at the faces of the people surrounding her, and she thinks that they’re feeling the same hope she is, and that it probably feels as strange for them as it does for her.

Moira closes her eyes and thanks June, and then makes her a promise. She won’t give up hope.

_Whoever is getting this. Please don’t forget me._


End file.
